This essay covers several reasons behind corporate media’s failure to cover the Occupy movement and other protests today. This is the bulk of an essay I wrote around the time of the Clinton impeachment. It was published widely on the Internet then, and most of it can easily apply now. Continue reading
The distinction George Orwell makes between nationalism and patriotism in his essay “Notes on Nationalism” is true of the media as well. A nationalist according to Orwell is basically a power-monger and nationalism an ego-centered discourse whereas patriotism stands for “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.” Continue reading
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recently issued their annual report on the status of freedom of the press in the world in which the lead article charges, amongst other things, that there are no independent journalists allowed in the East African country of Eritrea. Continue reading
The president of the United States gets away with murder, literally, in large part because journalists don’t do their job of reporting the news. Long gone are the days of investigative journalism and what should be an adversarial or at the very least distant relationship between reporters and presidential administrations. Continue reading
With the Federal Communications Commission scheduled to vote today on TV stations posting political advertising data on-line, we know pretty much for certain the final tally will be 2–1. What we don’t know is on which side of the issue Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will fall. Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online. Continue reading
She quietly walked into the classroom from the front and stood there, just inside the door, against a wall. Continue reading
Over the years, we’ve been reporting on how power is monopolized by the powerful. How corporate lobbyists, for example, far outnumber members of Congress. And how the politicians are so eager to do the bidding of donors that they allow those lobbyists to dictate the law of the land and make a farce of democracy. What we have is much closer to plutocracy, where the massive concentration of wealth at the top protects and perpetuates itself by controlling the ends and means of politics. This is why so many of us despair over fixing what’s wrong: we elect representatives to change things, and once in office they wind up serving the deep-pocketed donors who put up the money to keep change from happening at all. Continue reading
Neither of us is old enough to have been fooled by the Trojan Horse (see Wikipedia). But we each have been working in public television decades enough to remember the days when distribution was handled by physically transporting bulky 2-inch videotapes from station to station—“bicycled” was the word—and much of the broadcast day and night was devoted to blackboard lectures, string quartets and lessons in Japanese brush painting: The old educational television versions of reality TV. Continue reading
There were many deserving entrants for this year’s LUV News Lower-than-Whale-Poop Awards, but we thought National Public Radio was most deserving for the way it has completely eliminated discussion on public interest candidates for president, while endlessly discussing its own version of faux democracy. Continue reading
The Reduced Shakespeare Co. cleverly and humorously abridges all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays to 97 minutes. Short of having a set of Cliff’s Notes or a collection of Classic Comics, sources of innumerable student essays for more than a half-century, it may be the least painful way to “learn” Shakespeare. The critically-acclaimed show, in addition to being a delightful way to spend part of an evening, is a satiric slap upside the head of the mass media. Continue reading
(WMR)—WMR has learned and has personally experienced the unprecedented assault by the Obama administration, aided and abetted by its intelligence and internal security infrastructure, on the First Amendment right of freedom of the press. Continue reading
In the final days of the Libyan conflict, as NATO conducted a nonstop bombing campaign, an Aljazeera Arabic television correspondent’s actions raised more than eyebrows. They also raised serious questions regarding the journalistic responsibility of Arab media—or in fact any media—during times of conflict. Continue reading
One of the fun things sports writers do is try to predict the winners and scores of upcoming games, from high school through the pros. For special “look-at-us-we’re important” bonus points, they create lists of “Top” teams and rank them, both pre-season and weekly. Continue reading
Arab satellite television literally had a field day in their coverage of the revolutions and protests engulfing the Middle East and North Africa at the end of 2010 and throughout 2011, in fact till today. Continue reading
If the Democracy Movement, now occupying cities and towns across America, concludes with a half dozen transnational media companies still allowing only one opinion to get to citizens, it will have lost. Continue reading
Arguably, Herman Cain has exploited more workers than he has women, yet the media feeding frenzy these past few weeks has centered exclusively on the Godfather Pizza CEO’s sexual exploits. Continue reading
“Health Ministry Statistics say that the incidence of abnormal births has increased 400-fold since 1991. The Iraqis also say that, all told, 1.7m children have died because of the various effects of UN sanctions.” (The Economist, September 14th 2002, p 39) Continue reading
There is nothing the media love more than a good celebrity sex scandal. Continue reading
Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations. Continue reading
Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers [who] pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or coherence.” Continue reading
While much attention has been paid to Admiral Mike Mullen’s allegations that Pakistan’s ISI was behind recent attacks on American targets in Afghanistan attributed to the Haqqani network, the subsequent call by an influential neoconservative pundit for the United States to “get tough with Pakistan” seems to have gone unnoticed. Continue reading
The late Herbert Marcuse, author of One Dimensional Man, and Noam Chomsky, America’s most cited scholar, both have pointed out the advantage of controlling news through private corporate conglomerates. In 1947, in his seminal book, Inside USA, John Gunther called the Wolfe family of Columbus perhaps America’s most ruthless media monopoly. Continue reading
The most important media story this past week is that the Kardashians were guest co-hosts on the fourth hour of NBC’s “Today” show. One Kardashian sister per day, plus mother Kris and stepdad Bruce Jenner. Continue reading
On Friday, October 2, 1959, The Twilight Zone premiered on national television. Even though it was never a top 25 show, The Twilight Zone was an oasis in a television wasteland that captured a generation. However, it almost didn’t happen. Its subject matter troubled television executives, and the fact that the episodes often left viewers hanging went against formula. Continue reading
Napoleon Bonaparte called history, “A set of lies agreed upon.” Continue reading
“Both of Ibrahim’s arms were cut off. He had a hole in his lung. Parts of his legs were missing. His kidney was in a bad condition . . . we need people to stand with us.” These were the words of an exhausted man as he described the condition of his dying son in an interview with The Real News, an alternative news source. Continue reading
An uninformed people, irrespective of color or gender, are an enslaved people. Continue reading
A former managing editor for the online newspaper, OpEdNews, has sued the city of Philadelphia and eight of its police officers for violating her constitutional rights. Continue reading
CNN, which is competing with Fox News for the title of network for the political descendants of the Ku Klux Klan, Know Nothing Party, and John Birch Society, decided to co-host the last Republican presidential debate with the Tea Party, a Republican contrivance set up by the likes of former House GOP Majority leader Dick Armey and former George H W Bush counsel C. Boyden Gray. However, the Tea Party, unlike other Republican groups, has attracted a number of out-and-out neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, Jewish Defense League, neo-Confederates, and other gun-toting racist types who are happy to finally find a home where they can vent their hatred on CNN and Fox. Continue reading
I simply don’t get it! Actually, I haven’t been ‘getting it’ for a while. Maybe you can help me get it; will you? Here is the quandary: There are several major websites out there with quite a following. These websites advertise themselves as the ‘alternative.’ That is, the alternative to the mainstream media. They market themselves as ‘raw’ news and commentary sites. That is, the ‘real & raw’ news versus the processed, filtered, span bull sh. . sold to the public as ‘news.’ So, they say all that, right? Well, that was the straight forward and easy part. Continue reading
U.S. congressional sources have confirmed to WMR that the U.S. Capitol Police and other congressional officials shared sensitive information on members of Congress with Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets in Washington, including Fox News, in a manner similar to the situation in the United Kingdom where reporters for Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World bribed British law enforcement officials for sensitive information on public officials and private citizens. Continue reading
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